A Level RE, Television and Thermodynamics Combine Forces to Reveal Meaning of Life

I'm really sorry to do this, but you best stop what you are doing.  Please, just put that down, put it...there you go...listen to this.  Don't pick it up again when you think I'm not looking, just cross your arms and concentrate.

It appears, without too much of a fanfare, that the meaning of life has been revealed.

I'm going to walk you through it, but take your shoes off.

I'm sure you've all seen the work of Professor Brian Cox, his enigmatic billion year stare and his uncanny knack of making extraordinarily diffuse astrophysical topics seem as easy as pie (I myself got caught up in the Stargazing Live zeitgeist at New Year and went to a lecture by the Manchester Astronomical Society about the birth, life and death of stars.  There was a distinct cooling in the room when everyone realised that these topics are much more difficult to understand than watching three TV shows would have us believe, and that it isn't in fact possible to somehow absorb a PHd thesis while eating pickled onions on the sofa.  They do sterling work, though: http://www.manastro.co.uk/).  His new series, Wonders of the Universe, commenced apocalyptically with the nature of time itself.  (And you should watch it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/zf9dh/)

In this dimension at least, it seems the entirety of creation is bound in a Sisyphean work - to move forward, to change, to live and then to die.  From the tiniest bubble of the quantum foam to the vastest nebulous juggernaut of deep space, on every level, there is only change.  Time is a real thing, it exists (although no-one really knows in what form, see Cox's documentary "What Time Is It?" for a clearer introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VgzCMmaVLM&NR=1), and it compels us more than any other force of nature.

entropy at the core of a galaxy

But, inasmuch as we can understand it, this Universe is flinging itself headfirst into the future, and only that.  We are moving from a state of low entropy (complex, structured objects like galaxies, planets and skyscrapers) or order to states of high entropy or disorder, where line and form and shape and definition is sacrificed to the uniformity of chaos (no outlines, just an amorphous ooze of sameness).  This logic, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (that the Universe aches for balance everything out, so eventually all concentrations or lumps of stuff - matter, heat, etc. - will be dissembled and spread out, ashes to ashes) is applied by Cox to explain that this will also happen to everything within the Universe.  Its death is when all is balanced out, all is obliterated, all is smoothed out.

What strikes me as most glorious about this idea is that it is very similar to what many human civilisations have concluded about the meaning of life throughout history.  It seems that our constant exposure to death has led to an innate understanding of this "permanent change" of existence, from the Great Nothing at the beginning, leading us inexorably to the Great Nothing at the end.  The earliest gods were the sun and the moon, and these are extinguished every day, to be reborn.  I mentioned a while ago that it is as if we carry the most ancient memory of our existence before, and very occasionally we manage to communicate it.

The Maori explain it thus:

Tane raising the sky with his feet in the Maori creation myth

From the conception the increase,
From the increase the thought,
From the thought the remembrance,
From the remembrance the consciousness, 
From the consciousness the desire. 


The word became fruitful,
It dwelt with the feeble glimmering;
It brought forth night:
The great night, the long night, 
The lowest night, the loftiest night, 
The thick night, to be felt, 
The night to be touched, 
The night not to be seen, 
The night ending in death. 


From the nothing the begetting, 
From the nothing the increase, 
From the nothing the abundance, 
The power of increasing, 
The living breath.  

The Three Marks of Existence at
everydayink.blogspot.com

The most profoundly succinct of all these understandings of this now scientifically proven reality, was that of the Buddha.  His Three Marks of Existence are as follows, and they managed, 2000 years before, to express the same beautifully bleak reality:

1. All things are impermanent, always changing (anicca)
2. All existence is suffering, caused by attachment to impermanent things (dukkha)
3. There is nothing everlasting, no essence, no soul, no self (anatma)


So there, the meaning of life seems to be nothing more than an acceptance of this impermanence, a realisation that all will change and die, and the realisation that life is infused with the special, most tragic beauty of a rainbow, most elegant because it is fleeting, but we are part of it.